The TV room offers the perfect vantage point to see Nikki Moore’s backyard Japanese stroll garden, with one path leading up to the cedar and bamboo seating area. Moore’s love of Japanese gardens and crafts began in her childhood in Hawaii. Eduardo Contreras • U-T

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The TV room offers the perfect vantage point to see Nikki Moore’s backyard Japanese stroll garden, with one path leading up to the cedar and bamboo seating area. Moore’s love of Japanese gardens and crafts began in her childhood in Hawaii. Eduardo Contreras • U-T

Japanese garden landscaper Shin Masuda spent many hours adjusting the placement of the boulders around the large waterfall and koi pond. He doesn’t have a set design in mind when he starts a project. “It’s just instinct,” he said. Eduardo Contreras • U-T photos

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Japanese garden landscaper Shin Masuda spent many hours adjusting the placement of the boulders around the large waterfall and koi pond. He doesn’t have a set design in mind when he starts a project. “It’s just instinct,” he said. Eduardo Contreras • U-T photos

A Brazilian walnut wood floor adds rich warmth to the great room. At right is one of Moore’s paintings on the wall and a coffee table designed from a Japanese door. The patio table outside is made from Chinese stone. Eduardo Contreras • U-T photos

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A Brazilian walnut wood floor adds rich warmth to the great room. At right is one of Moore’s paintings on the wall and a coffee table designed from a Japanese door. The patio table outside is made from Chinese stone. Eduardo Contreras • U-T photos

The small, pebbled dry creek bed that meanders across Nikki Moore’s diminutive front yard is typical of a Karesansui Japanese garden design. It hints at, but belies, the grandeur that awaits through the front door of her once typical ’70s tract home in Del Mar.

When visitors first see the inside of the 3,000-square-foot home and view the Japanese stroll garden in the backyard of the half-acre lot, their surprise comes out in a single word.

“Their most common reaction is, ‘wow,’” said Moore, a painter and collector of Japanese crafts.

The front door opens to a modern Japanese-inspired great room that shows off her still-life paintings and works by San Diego artists Robert Ginder and Stephen P. Curry, as well as her Japanese ceramic and basket collections.

Moore and her husband, real estate agent Robert Czarnowski, revamped the room in a remodel two years ago. The design, by architect Stephen Dalton, added 1,200 square feet to the house and changed its essential shape from a rectangle to a “V.” The redesign added an office, a TV room, a gallery space, a small guest room and a bathroom, and included refinished floors with dark Brazilian walnut wood and floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding doors for unobstructed views of the garden.

“The house already had Japanese sensitivity, which is why you see all the windows,” Moore said. “The idea is that the inside goes out.”

The remodel afforded Moore the chance to use three Japanese doors she bought 10 years ago. One became a large coffee table in the great room, another a desk extension in the office, and the last was used as the door to a small sleeping space off the gallery area where Moore displays her paintings.

The gallery area is next to the bathroom where Moore used rough granite blocks that once lined a roadway in China for flooring and to cover much of the walls. She fashioned the granite sink from a Chinese vessel.

The TV room, like the office, makes great use of dark walnut floating shelves and “has one of the best views of the yard,” Moore said. It looks directly out to the garden’s focal point – a waterfall and koi pond.

A waterfall that could mask nearby freeway noise was the first thing Japanese garden landscaper Shin Masuda envisioned for the space when Moore brought him in after two attempts to design a Japanese garden on her own. Masuda, who is based in Lakeside, started the project in 2008 and completed the last phase, the hillside at the back of the property, last summer.

“Since it’s such a big yard, I told her, ‘Why don’t I come up with a so-called stroll garden,’ ” Masuda said. The garden is designed to be seen from different angles, not just one viewpoint, which made his job more challenging.

Masuda, who explained that he works from instinct rather than a blueprint, next thought about the placement of the trees behind the waterfall. He likened these trees to supporting actors. “I wanted to create a background (so it looked as though) the water was coming from the forest,” he said.

Masuda used Moore’s existing weeping cypress and pine trees and brought in forest pansy redbud trees. He also created a sitting area and high fence from western red cedar and bamboo that was harvested from the property.

One of the most important lessons he learned from the “old-timer” he apprenticed with was to use plants already on site when possible and to find plants that do well in San Diego that can be substituted for plants traditionally used in Japan.

“I don’t like to use too many flowering plants in order to give the calm, quiet sense that people ask for,” Masuda added. The few flowering plants he used include flowering quince, pomegranate and azaleas.

One of the most peaceful spots is the small courtyard garden tucked outside of the center of the “V” of the house, where the addition meets the old house.

The overall effect of balance and quiet in the garden comes in part from Masuda’s use of stones for walkways and dry creek beds. A stroll garden is designed to lead visitors to different vistas. Masuda created nobedon pathways from cobbles and slabs of concrete cut from the old patio. Nobedon paths are wide, made from two or more textures that are fitted together, usually in rectangular forms. Masuda uses these rock spaces, mostly gray in color, like a painter such as Moore might use negative space in a composition. “Nikki and I often talk about that, the balance,” he said.

Moore said she’s drawn to Japanese gardens and crafts because of the aesthetic.

“I love the Japanese garden idea,” she said. “It’s sort of sculptured, somewhat manicured, but something you would find in nature … All the rocks are placed in a way that’s not lined up, not symmetrical. There’s a meaning.”